‘re

johanna | March 19, 2012 at 6:57 pm |

Bart, your thinking is so muddled and tangled it is hard to know where to start. It is like the contents of a 10 year old’s knitting basket.

Believe me, johanna, I understand and empathize with your bemuddlement.

You come to this solution, as I did, with 10-year-old knitting of brow, burdened with preconceptions and mess, assuming what you think I’m saying is what I mean because you’re so entangled with old and unworkable ideas.

With respect, just drop your old ideas. Come at this clean and fresh, and you’ll see more clearly.

For example:

“The poor with voice, I have no need to exploit, as they speak for themselves. Which see http://prezi.com/es1vsjfeena3/the-durban-platform-on-climate-change/ – 194 signatories and the presentations within that conference of the (more or less) legitimate representatives of practically every nation on Earth, including the poorest of the poor. Guess what they say for themselves?”

If you really think that the junketeers and elites of Third World countries are the voice of the poorest of the poor, you are bordering on delusional.

Did I say poorest of the poor? No. I said the poor with voice. I’m not a magician. I can’t wave a wand and bring democracy to the Sudan or Syria, Somalia or the shameful North American poverty zones either.

Indeed, while the elites of poor nations are well known to tend to have little or no interest in the causes of the poor, if you claim that’s all that happened at Durban, then you didn’t pay attention.

You meet a lot of the poorest of the poor in daily life, johanna? Are you elected to speak for them? Qualified? Delegated? Did this mission to talk about them and their interests come to you by divine right? With all due respect, who’s delusional?

These people have their eye on the main chance – in this case, the prospect of a gravy train of free money and junkets and prestige for themselves and their cronies, courtesy of the West, with a few bucks here and there trickling down to the folks at home. The pitiable state of the countries they represent is in no small part due to their own corruption and incompetence.

I don’t in any particular dispute that what you say may be possible, however I’ve learned through long and bitter direct in person experience in these issues to be skeptical of everyone who tosses around unspecified generalities.

Where true, it does no good to be vague. Where false, it paints those free from fault with the same brush, a loathesome disenfranchisement.

Proof? Evidence? Citation? Data? Names? Which of the voices are these fraudsters, and which the legitimate ones? How do you tell the Kony Youtube video from factual and relevant cases? You haven’t demonstrated especial familiarity with development issues, the terminology, the organizations, or the germaine concerns. Do you know them? If not, then why not? If so, then why are you here exploiting them, instead of doing something about it?

Then you say:

“Growth comes from predictability and stability.”

Err, no. Grinding poverty can come from utterly predictable and stable conditions. Very dynamic growth, such as we see in China, can come from unpredictability and change. Ever heard of Schumpeter?

Schumpeter.. Schumpeter.. Schumpeter? The name sounds vaguely familiar. Tell me all about the predictability and stability of Haiti, johanna. Talk to me about how prosperous Katrina (admittedly, a long-predicted phenomenon, but treated administratively as if the prediction did not exist) made its victims. Sure, grinding poverty can come from tyranny, a predictable and durable condition, but that’s hardly in the realm of climate, then, is it?
Explain what you mean, please. However extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.. So be extraordinary.

Finally, you have reiterated over and over in your posts, as if we are all deaf and blind or something and didn’t get it the first six or seven times, that underpricing energy does the poor no favours. No sensible economist disagrees, and as far as I can tell, no-one in this thread has disagreed with that proposition.

No-one in this thread is a proponent of cheap energy through subsidy of fossil fuels, preferential policies that use taxes to build infrastructure that benefits only the fossil industry and its direct dependents, tax expenditures to fossil fuel companies and vehicles in the highest fuel consumption and CO2 emitting range?

Not Jim2? Not what he said.

Not Robert Ellison? Not what he said. Over and over and over again, as if we are all deaf and blind or something.

As you don’t believe you need six or seven counter examples, I’ll gladly stop there.

Where the disagreement arises is on how energy should be priced. For reasons that are obscure, and anyway irrelevant, you have decided that the traditional cost plus profit margin approach which maximises economic efficiency underprices energy and is therefore an attack on the poor. Te way to help the poor is to make it more expensive.

Uh no.

Clearly, I’m in no way talking about all energy. If you make a straw man by blurring the line between “carbon based energy” and “all energy”, then you will never understand the argument.

Not all energy comes from burning carbon. Why do you pretend it is, or must be? Don’t you want to understand?

Excluding all non-carbon energy, when we consider the special case of the segment of the market that emits CO2, we must recognize that emission as part of the production of the energy.
We must recognize, further, not because the science legitimately proves the human hand in the rise of CO2, but because the correlation of the human activity and the CO2 rise compels us to accept the probability and Risk of this activity are real. This is the same as the rationale for insurance, safety measures, helmets for children on bicycles, seatbelts and airbags in cars, and drunk driving bans.
Who absorbs the cost of the CO2 Risk?
All of us, equally, per capita, as none of us is ever likely to agree that we have no dog in this fight.
If you really feel no sense of Risk from this activity, that’s great. Foreswear your share of the revenues. Let it be split among your neighbors. Do you see me trying to dissuade you from abandoning your own wealth?
I’m just arguing that the Risk ought be priced, the service that reduces the Risk is the Carbon Cycle, the natural biology that most permanently sequesters CO2 out of the air, and the compensation for that Risk be paid to its owners — everyone in the nation, per capita — by whatever means best suits each nation.
It’s no different from apples or bandwidth. It’s a scarce resource. What does Capitalism do to ensure the most efficient distribution of a scarce resource? It puts it into the Market and the buyer pays the owner.

I’m afraid that this is the point where your grasp of economics morphs into some kind of weird ideological anabranch. Please provide examples of where and how making energy more expensive than it needs to be has helped the poor to improve their lives. Just one would be good, but a few would be much more convincing.

If you are persuaded to abandon the “all energy” straw man, and the unfounded assumption that energy will become more expensive in a market that more efficiently exerts the Law of Supply and Demand on energy pricing than the current subsidy and tax expenditure system, then we can proceed.

I’ll start with some examples of the harms of the current system:
1. Distortion. By interfering in the decisions of every individual buyer and seller in the Market through non-Market fiat and command and control measures preferential to fossil fuels (and the shameful biofuel scam), the whole Market loses value. That value just disappears. Money vanishes. I’m sure you know how this works, whatever anabranch of Economics you prescribe to.
2. Churn. Subsidies to concerns, where they aren’t tax expenditures, take tax money out of the economy, hold it in limbo, then pay it directly to those distortionate concerns. That period in limbo makes the power of that money to drive the economy vanish for that time. No?
3. Innovation. A Market grows as it leans. Why invest in innovation for a future you know your government is doing everything possible to avoid for the benefit of a few free riders?
4. Free Riders. If you need an explanation, I refer you to Schumpeter On Democracy, An Economic Approach, Chpt 3.3: Political Failure?
I’ll stop before I get to 5, as 6 might offend; and let’s not forget, Seven ate Nine.

So, examples of ‘more expensive energy’ making the lives of the poor better, aside from the logical extension of the cure of avoiding 1-4?

Price CO2 emission. Return the revenue to the entire populace per capita, defining the ‘entire populace’ as the CCL does, wage-earners through their paychecks, for our example. (It’s not the only possible definition, let each nation choose how it does it.)
We know from the British Columbia example and close studies that about 70% of the general population earns significantly more dividend than it spends on fees for CO2. This ratio appears to hold true across populations and nations; perhaps there’s a law of human activity here. Perhaps it’s coincidence.
The overlap of ‘the poor’ with the 70% is virtually complete, with a few notable exceptions. Let each nation deal with those exceptions as it will.

Here, the poor have more money. Far more money in most cases. They have Risk, but the Risk is being curtailed if raising the price of their Risk works as Capitalism generally does under Supply and Demand, but they also have money to spend to protect themselves from that Risk.
And if you’re in that 70% and _not_ poor, well you’re also ahead of the game.

If you’re in the 10% who neither gain nor lose in net as CO2 pricing drives your CO2 energy cost up about as much as your income rises, then your ship rises on the rising tide of innovation and economic efficiency.

If the 30% not advantaged begin to shift to reduce waste (with the 70% of CO2 saints), then suddenly we see everyone benefitting. As the revenues fall, so too do the cost of all those fossil-based non-emitting products: fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals, plastics, raw inputs to a wide variety of synthetic goods, and the lost revenue from the Risk is more than made up for, again while Risk either reduces or revenues from the Risk allow each individual to find the best measure to adapt.

Do you follow now?

What questions do you have?

Thanks for your attention.

lolwot,
Reading a hack true believer trying to dismiss the problems of the AGW dogma is not really effective anymore.
But your faith earns you a gold star- and a brown nose.

NW | March 19, 2012 at 10:09 pm |
Bart, I think that you fundamentally misunderstand what ‘economic scarcity’ is and is not.

I live to be enlightened. Let’s see if I can keep up with your lessons.

When a government auctions broadcast frequencies, they are not creating artificial scarcity where there was no true economic scarcity.
Exactly.
There is true economic scarcity in the Carbon Cycle.
CO2 keeps going up, after millions of years so far as our best estimation can tell of the widest definition of the Carbon Cycle keeping it stable at 230 +/-50 ppmv.
What’s changed? Most probably, us.
Market decisions aren’t made on scientific evidence, or courtroom evidence, but on opinion and deliverables. Can you deliver a 280 ppmv atmosphere tomorrow?
No? Then can you prove the level has no connection to human activity? No? Then the opinion of the Market ought be sought, through the democracy of individual players making individual purchase decisions.. unless you seek to substitute the wisdom of your own personal opinion for the judgement of the Market.
The reason is that the use of a frequency imposes external costs on near-neighbor frequencies in the form of interference. Incidentally, I think technology is an important determinant of the scope and severity of that externality: The guys who know about these things get better over time at dealing with that interference. As that takes place, the ‘frequencies resource’ can be used more densely, and this allows more frequencies to be auctioned. But fundamentally two things are making frequencies scarce: Current technology, and the fact that each frequency has a socially valuable alternative use–if only to minimize interference at near-neighbor frequencies by laying it aside unused. At least this is my touchy-feely understanding of the issue. Surely some of our denizens with signal-processing expertise (they are legion) will chime in and say “NW you bonehead it is like this” but I doubt they will disagree that using frequencies too densely imposes external costs on all users of frequencies.

NW, you’re close enough for horseshoes, based on my experience in the industry (why do you suppose I keep talking about it?) Certainly you’re not so far off as will alter the meaning of the metaphor.

Then there’s oxygen in the atmosphere at sea level on dry land. There are highly valued uses for this. But at the margin when I breathe in, subtracting some from the atmosphere, that imposes no private or social cost on anyone else. No labor or capital needs to be delivered to supply it; and it deprives no one of an alternative valued use of that breath of oxygen. If you tried to set up a business to provide this oxygen to normal healthy people, you could not command a positive price for it. There is no private or social cost associated with taking free oxygen. There MAY be a private or social cost associated with inserting other obnoxious crap into the atmosphere. But the oxygen itself is not a scarce good: So it is a free good with a zero price everywhere at sea level on dry land, and that is the right price for it, from the perspective of economic efficiency. If the government were to declare that we can use no more than q* units of oxygen, and charged the price p* to everyone for using it, the social damage at the margin would be the price p*, because this is a contrived kind of scarcity putting a wedge equal to p* between the benefit of the last unit consumed and the total social cost (zero) of consuming it.

That’s a long way around to get to a point, which is always suspicion-arousing, but I’m with you up to here, and hardly in a position to complain about longwindedness.

The oxygen case is, I think, wholly analogous to the good I would call “CO2 disposal services” from the viewpoint of private costs and benefits. We all gather on this blog because we all would like to straighten out whether the marginal ton of “privately free” disposal of CO2 is “socially free.” That depends on whether that marginal ton has a deleterious net impact on social welfare. A contrived scarcity of CO2 disposal services (by setting q* and auctioning off that quantity at the p* the private market bears) cannot answer the question of whether CO2 has a social cost or not. It simply ignores that question, totally, and creates a contrived (not an economic) scarcity, and thus has no basis whatsover in any utilitarian social welfare maximization.

Respectfully, no.

Your analogy falls apart immediately.

Firstly, net impact is a nubbin.

If I don’t seek a benefit, then being handed it does not indenture me to debt of any sort.

You walk up to me and hand me a $20 bill I did not seek, nor make any agreement upon for exchange, you cannot later say I owe you anything.

This is one of the fundamentals of contract law, for example, and is a well-understood principle. Your argument does not wash in the particular, and it does not wash in the general.

(Also, I’m the last to claim to understand why anyone else gathers on this blog.)

The scarcity of CO2 disposal services arises naturally with the Risk of increased CO2. No other element is needed, nor impinges this social cost. It’s well recognized (see Hale 2002) and established.

You’re makin’ stuff up. I’m not ignoring the question. I’m addressing the known inequity.

Do you still disagree? Why?

Well, Bart, the best I can say is that you didn’t show up at this blog in boots and with a whip in hand for your big, “Speckled Hen” moment. I mean, Louise can get away with that sort of thing–but not you, Bart. So don’t get any ideas. O. K.?

JamesG | March 19, 2012 at 3:06 pm |

This signatories said that? “Give us money.”

Can you point to a source? Citation? Something signed by all 194 signatories with those words in it? Or are you making a joke? I can’t tell.

“Most folk, especially economics bods, have noticed that growth runs parallel with the availability of cheaper energy to an extent that is difficult to ignore.”

Yeah? I also observe that it’s generally morning when people feel most hung-over. Hangovers, caused by sunlight, obviously. You’re confusing ‘cheap fuel’ with ‘efficient economy’ based on an incomplete and slanted view of historical data.

Speaking of..

The Soviet Union was never one of the mightiest economies on the planet?

Which planet do you mean?

After the USA, it’s true there’s a huge gap, but it was an economy covering more land than any other single economic entity, and second in population, second in GDP, it made it into space and onto the moon, it fielded more nukes and more troops than anyone else. Name the five other candidates you suggest were mightier at the peak of the Soviet Union’s performance, and say why.

It’s true it wasn’t the _best_ economy, the wisest, the most durable, but denying the soviets were mighty once belittles the success of the West immensely. It makes what we did smaller. It sounds Unamerican.

maksimovich | March 18, 2012 at 3:27 am |

Given that there is no sign this will happen, do you have a practical solution that could?

Bart,

I’ve just tried to get the economics straight in this discussion, without taking a position as to whether or not there are net positive or negative effects of CO2 disposal or what their size is, which I do not know. I’m no expert in contract law, but I would guess it isn’t perfectly aligned with utilitarian considerations. And you are right that I overstepped what I can strictly infer about why people come to this blog.

As far as the economics of the situation go, I’ve tried to explain my professional opinion (some of it; the thing is more complex than a few blog posts can take care of). I respect you enough to leave it at that without recrimination.

Reply to Bart @9.45pm ?9.47pm.

Bart, I’ll discuss the Austrians at a later data,…much later.
Re the immediate, Bart: Your You tube scenario from the Climate Reality Project is exactly what I mean. Visited their website. Luuv the prominent smiling image of Al Gore. Why is it that totalitarian movements always go for the big image of the leader?

Liked their offer,’Invite an Al Gore trained presenter to your local community. ‘(Mutter… think I’ll jest go and practise some lassoin’, its gonna be on fer one n’ all.)

http://joannenova.com.au/2012/03/conspiracy-theorist-just-another-form-of-namecalling-from-the-class-who-want-to-be-global-rulers/

EU greens pushing “World Parliament”. If you oppose you must be a “conspiracy theorist”. Some good examples of Owellian word destruction associated to climate “advocacy”.

Eerily similar to Lindzen’s mistake in his Parliamentary speech, pointed out by Gavin at Real Climate. He used a GISTEMP Met station (land) index as current and the global GISTEMP LOTI index as past making it seem like warming had increased with what he thought was just a newer GISTEMP version. He blamed it on his source. Can’t any of these skeptics get their datasets straight? How can anyone trust what they say anymore?

While I am not into counting posts the numbers seem to be made up by only a handful of posters of whom Bart would go close to half.

I called Willis out on his WUWT thread on this last week. I said something to the effect that everyone knows volcanoes increase the albedo, and I think he wanted to say something like only before they warm it again, but I am not sure what he was saying really.

Should be
…only before they decrease it again…

Thank you Chief Hydrologist.
Cervantes is wonderful. Just reading his preface reveals how acutely he is aware of the shifting mix of imagination, fiction and fact with which we see the world and ourselves. Heck, it even happens in Science and on Judith’s blog.

Willis:

This is the line from the thread that caught my attention:

“conducting climate model experiments”

When a hypothesis is unfalsifiable, that renders it pseudoscientific. Therefore if, when any weather event occurs, it is claimed by climate scientists to be “consistent with” climate change, such a comment gives weight to the claim that the hypothesis is unfalsifiable, and therefore not properly scientific.

Has anyone heard a climate scientist say, EVER, that a weather event is inconsistent with the hypothesis of AGW?

http://auscm.co/FPzgLU

Simon
Australian Climate Madness

In the case of climate science, one major flaw is that most mainstream climatologists have started with a working hypothesis (namely, GHG cause global warming) and all their efforts thenceforth have been directed to support that hypothesis, and to turn it into an alarming prospect of very much global warming, e.g. by adopting a relatively high value for climate sensitivity. No major attempt has been made in mainstream climatology to falsify the original hypothesis, or to seriously explore the possibility that perhaps sensitivity is much lower. The certainty of model projections has been grossly exaggerated (or their uncertainty consistently understated, to put it in a gentler way). The magnitude of adverse effects has been generally overstated, even to the point of making scary predictions for the near future that –so far– have failed to materialize at the established deadline, or are not going at the pace required to meet the projections. A number of unexpected results have been emerging, but all the efforts are directed at reducing their significance as in the case temperatures not rising for more than a decade in spite of increasing CO2 concentrations (the missing heat might be hidden in the deep oceans); or tree rings not showing enlargement but shrinking for half a century after 1960, in spite of observed warming (one may use some innocent “trick” to hide the decline, such as not using the unwanted data).

No serious attempt at falsification, no career devoted to that purpose, at least not in mainstream climate science. Only some solitary voices, from elderly professors and the odd Nobel prize winner, and a host of amateurs in blogs. Most young and energetic climatologists just follow the trend. It seems like Max Planck upside down. Planck famously said that a theory gets superseded not by persuasion but by the demographic process whereby old timers that believe in the old theory are gradually replaced by younger minds that adopt the new theory. But in this case it seems to be running backwards: older physicists and climatologists do not participate in the confirmatory effort around climate change models, while their younger colleagues do. Neither does the required Popperian work of trying (and trying hard) to disprove the mainstream theory, the former because they are mostly retired, the latter because their whole careers are invested in the opposite direction.

Besides the non existence of sustained efforts towards falsification, another important constraint is that most of the issues are not about experimental results but about model projections, which are based on scenarios and are, by definition, not falsifiable. So the task of any falsifier would be hard. Many model parameters are hardly written in stone: most are rough estimates that have wide uncertainty margins, and even those estimates and their uncertainty margins are themselves based on debatable assumptions (e.g. estimates of climate sensitivity) and poor or incomplete understanding of the processes at play (e.g. clouds).

On top of all that, there is a wide and powerful current of ideological persuasion and policy advocacy underlying research on climate change. Many non-scientists display strong activism for or against any particular proposition in climate science, and scientists are themselves, more often than not, clearly engaged on one side or another in the political controversy surrounding the climate. The dispassionate approach of science, which looks only for the truth, is difficult to adopt in such environment.
All this does not turn the whole of climate science into a pseudoscience, but many of the classical components are there, and probably some specific fields within climatology have been more heavily affected by pseudoscientific influences. It is time for climate scientists to distance themselves from the fray, and put their act together in a more sensible way.

‘How many parameters? Give me four parameters and I’ll draw you an elephant: give me five and I’ll waggle its trunk.’ attributed to Linus Pauling

Atmospheric and oceanic simulations cross the line into psuedo-science when they are used to ‘project’ temperature into the far future. That they are then defended as ‘boundary problems’ that converge on an average climate state is far less mathematics than wish fulfillment. The mathematics of climate models insist that solutions diverge chaotically as a result of small differences in both initial and boundary conditions.

Even in the shorter the proper purpose of models is – perhaps – exploring causes and couplings. Although it seems that a ‘full representation for all dynamical degrees of freedom in different quantities and scales is uncomputable even with optimistically foreseeable computer technology.’ http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.full

Solutions in both cases are chosen based on the behaviour of the solution after the fact. Non-unique inputs result in solutions that are arbitrarily distant to a degree that is not known. So we have results that are based on arbitrary choices and models that from consideration of fundamental mathematical principles can’t possibly provide the results on climate or attribution that are claimed?

‘Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status. Pseudoscience is often characterized by the use of vague, exaggerated or unprovable claims, an over-reliance on confirmation rather than rigorous attempts at refutation, a lack of openness to evaluation by other experts, and a general absence of systematic processes to rationally develop theories.’

How are AOS not pseudo-science?

There’s a bit of either/or fallacy in the idea that climate science is “either” pseudo science “or” it’s not. I believe it muddies the water a good bit to leave the formulation of the issue there.

It is universally true that any predictive science has a degree of uncertainty associated with it. Therefore, the value (formal inductive sense of the word) of an argument or proposition is dependent on the degree of probability with which it can be held. i.e. “There’s an 80% chance of rain tomorrow.” Actually what that statement says is that there’s an 80% probability that a binary formulation (rain or no rain) will tend to manifest in one of the possible binary states rather than the other. (Understanding this helped me to get over my loathing of the evening TV weather people.)

In this case, we would evaluate the quality of the weather person’s predictions by seeing if his/her predictions mapped to being correct 80% or better of the time. Sadly, I’ve done this casually in our area (central coast CA). It actually bears out…for awhile that is. Typically, predictive quality persists until a major, ongoing weather pattern changes. The most notable recurring events in our area seem to be El Nino and patterns that develop in the Gulf of Alaska that yank the jet stream north and south. When either, both or other substantial regional weather patterns occur, the weather people look like absolute blithering loons until their spreadsheet models catch up to current state. (Typically, if the change resulted in unexpected rain, the 10 day forecast will show rain continuing until forever, until such time as the spreadsheet stabilizes.) In short, when I hear about a major weather pattern changing in the winter, I keep a damn jacket in my truck all the time.

The point is with a few very profound exceptions (JCurry being first among those in my experience to date), the “climate” debate hinges on both sides claiming degrees of certainty that the nature of the problem does not support. I propose that it furthers the argument when the Joe Friday approach is used in place pejorative labeling, i.e. “Just the facts ma’am.” While it might be tempting to call something that looks ridiculous pseudo science, it’s probably better just to focus on looking at the details that seem to support a particular conclusion rather than spouting over arching indictment. (As a corollary, the idea that “But he started it!”…think IPCC…isn’t helpful either.) We can leave the commentary, name calling and rebuttal to talk radio, politicians and all others who know all and are unselfish enough to share their brilliance persistently and incessantly with the rest of us.